Council Housing Rent Direct Debit Form document - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Accessibility legislation (on legislation.gov.uk website) states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format, unless doing so would impose a disproportionate burden on the organisation. If that is the case, an assessment of the extent to which compliance with the accessibility requirement imposes a disproportionate burden must be carried out.

This is a Disproportionate Burden Assessment for the Council Housing Rent Direct Debit Form which is in PDF format.

The benefits of creating accessible versions of these PDFs would be:

• a fully accessible version for all users to access
• an easily searchable and indexable version

The form allows users to sign up to Direct Debit payments for council housing rent.

Any online process would need to have integrated payments functionality with the Council's systems.

The form would therefore need significant development to enable users to set up a Direct Debit payment online, for submission to the Council.

The annual average number of paper applications the Council receives each year would be disproportionate to the investment in technology required to provide an online form.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• Requests for additionally accessible versions are rare - no resident has requested an accessible version of a previous version of the document
• We will always assist with accessible versions on request

We assess that the cost involved in creating a fully accessible process to replace the current document would place an undue burden on the Council, given the small number of requests received per year.

Oxford City Council supports residents with accessible needs as much as possible and we will respond to all requests from users that relate to this form.

15 May 2026